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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

Python was built as an education/learning language first. It's popular because it's often a first language learned, and necessity in education/research space caused a lot of innovation over the years.

The only thing I like about VB (.Net) is that it supports XML literal notation... which was crazy useful in the mid-2000's when dealing with Flash (it's own XML literal notation) as a data passing option. I know others that utilized that feature well for Xaml applications.

I'd much rather just use C# at this point. Actually, I'd rather use JS (node/deno) or rust than C#.

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> Python was built as an education/learning language first. It's popular because it's often a first language learned

That's my point. Colleges have been teaching Visual Basic as a starter programming language for decades. Only in the last handful of years have colleges started switching to teaching Python first... after many years of neglect by Microsoft. My local college still has an entire specialization of their CS degree based on VB.

Python is where it is today because Microsoft has steadily ignored the language that brought new CS students straight into the .NET world.

IronPython gave it a go, but the team got broken up and that was that. pythonnet is trying to reboot things.

> Colleges have been teaching Visual Basic as a starter programming language for decades.

Where? In the US, university-level intro to programming would have been in Lisp, Forth, C, C++, and/or Java before possibly trying something else in the mid 2000s, but I struggle to imagine an American university strong in CS touching anything in the VB namespace (5, 6, .NET) whatsoever.

You struggle to imagine because you went elitist. "University level strong in CS", I said college. A lot of colleges teach Visual Basic. No, Ivy League schools might not, but a lot of colleges do. Heck, my community college taught a class for kids on it in the late 90s (my intro to programming) and still teaches college students a VB track today.

Well hey, I personally took a C programming course at the local community college, way back when, and have never met someone who learned VB outside of business/industry. Same way that Excel+VBScript are very useful but not taught as CS, but perhaps are covered in business classes. It occurred to me that your use of "college" might be the non-US meaning.

I have never heard anyone from any school in any country mention they used VB in school. Everyone I know who used VB, including me, learned it outside of school (either as a hobby or at work). I don't think VB in colleges was ever as widespread as you claim.

The two pieces of evidence I'd give you as proof of widespread use:

1. The r/visualbasic subreddit is constantly fighting people trying to use it for very low-effort homework help (just tell me how to do this problem, rather than asking for specific issues). It's literally every other post to the sub.

2. Almost no Visual Basic books are still published today. The few that are, are college textbooks, which explicitly mention them as being part of a degree: https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-Windows-Database-App...

It is a thing for Excel courses. My sister was an accountant a few years ago and had to learn VB to write macros (because businesses are still stuck in the 80s)

Got my 2 year in 2010 at a local CC... they taught VB.Net and DB2 SQL on mainframes. I THINK they are moving towards more JavaScripty stuff but I'd not be surprised if the CC still teaches VB and DB2 Sql because local corporations still have the need.

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